Advertising. Product design. Signage. All of these things have a certain weight behind them. They set out to communicate something, and someone has spent money on making sure that they do it properly.
Which makes it all the more interesting when, for whatever reason, they don’t succeed at doing that. Here’s 10 examples I’ve documented over the years. As always, you can click for a bigger version.
1. ING loves you. And your home.
It's difficult to maintain your brand "voice" when you've got legislatively large small print undermining you.
2. New opportunities in rodent co-branding
Paradise Wildlife Park has sponsorship deals for a wide range of rodents, but I presume they tried it out with the guinea-pigs first.
3. See What They Did There
What I like about the promotional signs outside of churches is the way you can feel how much thought and pride has gone into them. And then there's this one.
4. Destiny hedges its bets
This looks to me like a classic case of a creative slogan being horribly compromised by subsequent committee decisions.
5. The Internationally Recognised Symbols for the Sins of the Fish
These pictograms actually demonstrate some impressive feats of design. Stop and consider how you would illustrate something as fundamental - yet subtle - as "Do Not Steal The Fish".
6. Follow These Simple Step By Step Instructions.
You want a theme for your PS3. You find one on the PSN service. At this point, you might imagine there would be a button you press to apply that theme. That would be too easy. Instead you must memorise a sequence of instructions, which doesn't actually appear to be given in order. And that also might be out of date.
7. You’ll Like This – Not A Lot
When attempting to purchase this toothpaste in Finland, the pharmacists actively warned us against it. I think the fact that the product has to clearly explain that you won't like it but you should keep using it anyway demonstrates all that is great about the human race. And more.
8. The Mysteries of Good Menu Design
You are an all-you-can-eat chinese buffet. You can get a great deal on red guava juice wholesale. What subtle alterations can you make to your menu to encourage people to pick it over their usual favourites? (Anecdotally, I note that this strategy is actually extremely effective).
9. Visitors Voted This Review Most Helpful
I always find it slightly strange that the DVD packaging of terrible movies seems wildly unaware of the world's collective judgement, so this is a breath of fresh air. Of course, this is a pirate DVD. Now you know why they say piracy is killing movies. Killing them with honesty.
10. Just Needs A Clearer Call To Action
I spotted this many years ago in Waterloo station. The scrolling poster board had actually got stuck in this position, and my first thought was "that estimate sounds way too low."
Note for pedants: Not all of these things are signs, nor do they all match the description I gave at the start. Sorry about that.As some form of compensation, I offer you this closing bracket that you can mentally pair off against an unclosed one you were irritated by elsewhere on the internet).
The ‘Things’ email has existed in one form or another for over a year now. The fact that this is number 36 and not 52 shows that I clearly take too many Fridays off. (Actually it was mainly due to a big hiatus). Anyway, I have this Friday off, but have decided that that is not a good enough excuse.
Owing to the popularity of the chicken video last week and the sort-of anniversary of Things and the approaching of Christmas and the addition of more people to the list over the year, I thought it might be an idea to have a ‘Best of Things’ roundup next week.
So please reply and nominate your favourite items that have ever appeared in Things, and I will use these to compile a top 5, or something. I guess the people that just joined in the most recent wave don’t really have enough to go on, sorry! [Note, not a live question, this was sent in December 2008! – T.M. 22/1/11]
We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.”
Link
Wondermark is a webcomic that is also a really great example of the value of copyright expiry. David Malki takes images from the 1800s (sourced from the public domain or his own collection of rare books), does a bit of photoshop and then adds speech bubbles.
He’s actually not bad at drawing either, but his writing is really very good, and this enables him to focus on that.
My personal favourite strip is a great example of how he makes humour out of philosophy:
http://wondermark.com/413/
My favourite sequence consists of four strips about getting rich, or not, which begins here:
http://wondermark.com/383/
A good example of his skill as a writer can be found in the following strip, in which there is a well-argued, thoughtful and erudite argument against the advertising for Shrek the Third, in about 60 words:
http://wondermark.com/298/
Puzzle
Last week we wondered why a chicken holds it’s head so still. A bit of Googling didn’t prove it immediately, but I am pretty confident that the reason is this: their vision, or processing of vision, is either movement-based or strongly prioritises movement. A bit like the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park.
This week a bit of estimation for you. In the UK, are there more households with dogs, or more with cats?
A Video (or two)
This video was brought to my attention by Richard. Alan Watts was a dude who knew what he was talking about, and said some wise things. The South Park guys did some animations that went with those things. Here is my favourite:
For you cat/Roomba fans, here’s another video of a cat riding a Roomba – this time the Roomba is behaving normally rather than being remote controlled. It gets a bit repetitive but do skip to the end if you get bored, as Something Happens:
Picture
A shrewd linguistic analysis of laughter:
Not really a picture I suppose, but best expressed as one.
I joined LoveFilm last week, mainly so I would know what I was talking about when giving a presentation to them on what I think they should be doing. It turns out they already do a lot of what I had first thought of so I knew to leave that out, and during the presentation I found out that they are planning to do a lot of the stuff I thought of too.
In other words, they do a lot of stuff that I think is good, and are going to do more. My name is Tim Mannveille and I endorse this message.
My Lovefilm profile is here so you can see what I’m doing with the service, and here is my referral link that gives you a 1 month free trial and me a referral bonus!
Films
So, I still don’t have time to see enough films for a Cineworld Unlimited card to be worth it, but the LoveFilm £3.99/month for 2 DVDs is about right. So this week I saw The City of Lost Children, by much the same team as Delicatessen and Amelie. It was visually incredible, inventive and dreamlike, as expected.
A link
While researching quite what is possible in terms of tracking mobile phones, I stumbled upon a bit of real life drama on Google Answers. “I’m trying to locate a friend who has gone missing and may be in a lot of trouble…”
“When technology shifts, it bends the culture. Once, long ago, culture revolved around the spoken word. The oral skills of memorization, recitation and rhetoric instilled in societies a reverence for the past, the ambiguous, the ornate and the subjective.
Then, about 500 years ago, orality was overthrown by technology. […] The distribution-and-display device that we call printing instilled in society a reverence for precision (of black ink on white paper), an appreciation for linear logic (in a sentence), a passion for objectivity (of printed fact) and an allegiance to authority (via authors), whose truth was as fixed and final as a book. In the West, we became people of the book.
Now invention is again overthrowing the dominant media. A new distribution-and-display technology is nudging the book aside and catapulting images, and especially moving images, to the center of the culture. We are becoming people of the screen.”
A Video
Well, this week’s Things has been very serious so far, so it’s time for a video of someone moving a chicken around while the chicken holds its head incredibly still:
A Puzzle
Last week I asked people to guess why the search term ‘uncertainty’ showed such an odd annual trend. The most likely explanation seems to be students searching for Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle – if you put other terms students might be looking up into Google trends, you see the same annual trend cropping up. [Google Insights for Search also helps as it reveals what people tend to actually be looking for when searching for a given search term – T.M. 2/1/11]
This week, the question is: why do chickens keep their heads so still?
Video
I saw Black Swan recently and recommend it to anyone that likes the look of the trailer, so long as you’re not squeamish as that’s a whole side of the movie the trailer skims over:
With a reported production budget of $13m (which, as I never tire of telling people, would be just enough to cover Tron Legacy’s costume budget, and was also so restrictive that Natalie Portman opted to forego her trailer in order to afford an on-set medic), I was particularly fascinated by the beautifully subtle (and some not-so-subtle) digital effects they nonetheless managed to achieve. Most excellently, you can see a showreel of how these effects were put together on Look Effects’ website, although if you haven’t seen the film you should steer well clear as it will completely ruin the film for you.
Links
Have Instapaper or Read It Later at the ready because I’m about to flag up some serious long-form content. I don’t think it was available online when it was first published, but you can now read Matt Taibbi’s dilligently researched yet seething explanation of quite what Goldman Sachs does over at Rolling Stone, in which he memorably begins:
The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.
Over a year later even publications like The Week will casually refer to them as “Giant vampire squid Goldman Sachs”, which is I think excellent. It’s long, but well worth it, and it has a great twist ending.
Corporations have a mean life expectancy of around 30 years, but are potentially immortal; they live only in the present, having little regard for past or (thanks to short term accounting regulations) the deep future: and they generally exhibit a sociopathic lack of empathy.
I think the way we tend to automatically expect groups of humans to behave like individual humans is one of the most disastrous mistakes we make on a daily basis.
Puzzle
All ovens that I’ve seen have some kind of temperature ‘input’ dial, but why do so few have any kind of readout of the actual internal temperature, to the point that there is a market for independently purchased oven thermometers? Shouldn’t market forces guide the manufacturers to include such a feature themselves?
Picture
I see a lot of data visualisations that make me angry because they do little more than treat data as almost random input for some kind of procedural image generation process (which is actually very cool when it doesn’t claim to be something it isn’t). This New York Times visualisation of stock market returns over the past 90 years, on the other hand, is actually quite practical at giving you both an overall sense of the patterns while still making each data point quite clear.
I'd just like to make it clear that I'm using the 'ragged edge' functionality of FS capture to show that this is only part of the image. A while ago, when everyone at work had just got in to FS Capture, it was used on just about every image you saw. Those were dark days.
Angela suggests it’s all to do with herd instinct:
We are constantly (often subconsciously) comparing ourselves with others around us and balancing the desire to fit in (be part of the herd) with our desire to ‘self-express’ (stand out). Even small differences between us and others in the herd could potentially threaten us if they lead us to be ostracised or confer upon others some advantage in terms of survival or reproduction. I think that’s one of the reasons we a) notice and b) are so perturbed by even slight differences – they could signify a real risk to our deepest interests.
I think that’s part of the answer, although it doesn’t explain why we’re more tolerant of a lot of other things, or at least tolerant of variation in one direction (such as how we judge others’ use of free time).
I initially thought it covered those particular areas of life because we recognise them as prisoner’s dilemma / tragedy-of-the-commons areas, where a few people taking the easy way risk leading society to a collectively suboptimal Nash equilibrium.
However, I now think there’s two separate factors at work. In driving, even slight differences in speed add up to one car overtaking another, which we can’t help but read as a social signal that one is ‘doing it wrong’ (and we see the same thing with walking speed).
On the other hand, things like specific bits of grammar pedantry or household hygiene fall into a category of behaviours drummed into us as children, which we then cling on to tenaciously through a combination of Anchoring and Status Quo Bias. Deviation from these things is more on a sub-task basis (“I can’t believe they don’t clean their skirting boards!”) rather than a spectrum, as we adhere to whichever specific rules we were taught.
